Hamilton's Background

Caribbean Son

The island of Nevis in the Caribbean is a volcanic cone approximately five miles in
diameter and 1,300 miles away from New York City. Today, its primary tourist attraction
(perhaps its only tourist attraction) is the house in Charles Town where Alexander Hamilton was
born. His parents were James Hamilton, an unsuccessful Scotch businessman, and Rachel
Fawcett Lavien, who was still married to another man when Alexander was born (she was
divorced from John Lavien in 1758). Although she and James Hamilton started a family together,
they never married.

In 1765, shortly after the family moved to the island of St. Croix, James Hamilton, who
had never succeeded in his various business ventures, abandoned Rachel and the two boys,
Alexander and James. Rachel opened a small shop in the main town, James was apprenticed to a
carpenter, and Alexander, then 11 years old, took work as a clerk at the trading post of Cruger
and Beckman. The main export of St. Croix at this time was sugar, the main labor force
slaves.

These early experiences helped shape critical facets of Hamilton's later thinking. Having
spent his entire youth outside the American colonies (he moved to New York at the age of
seventeen), Hamilton never developed the kind of state or regional loyalty that characterized so
many of his colleagues. He could envision the United States as a single entity in which partisan
regional interests would be subsumed to the health and stability of the whole.

At the same time, Hamilton witnessed the brutal system of slavery which drove the
economy of St. Croix. Slave rebellions occasionally erupted, occasionally resulting in deaths of
whites, but they were always crushed, the slaves forced back into lives of unremitting and
unrewarded toil. As an adult, Hamilton consistently opposed slavery, served as an officer of the
New York Manumission Society and tended to hold the southern planter class in low regard. It
should be noted, however, that, as a true pragmatist, he was willing to compromise on issues of
slavery in the interests of strengthening the union. The South's slave-based economy, after all,
provided the raw materials that drove the economic engines of the North, which Hamilton
regarded as the essential foundation for the country.

Meanwhile, Hamilton's tenure as a bookkeeper, and briefly as manager, at Cruger and
Beckman exposed him to the intricacies of business world and fostered in him an appreciation of
the importance of trade and of precise economic reasoning. Still, the knowledge he gained in the
position did not come close to satisfying his desire for a life of adventure beyond the shores of St.
Croix. In a 1769 letter to his friend Edward Stevens, Hamilton
wrote, "...I mean to prepare the way for futurity, I'm no Philosopher you see and may be justly
said to Build Castles in the Air, my Folly makes me ashamed and beg youll conceal it, yet Neddy
we have seen such schemes successful when the Projector is Constant. I shall Conclude saying I
wish there was a war" [sic].

In the short term, the destruction that Hamilton saw was not a war but a devastating
hurricane that hit St. Croix in August, 1772. In a letter to his father describing the storm, the
17-year-old Hamilton reflected on human nature and the apparent wrath of God: "Where now,
oh! vile worm, is all thy boasted fortitude and resolution? What is become of thy arrogance and
self-sufficiency?" This critical view of humankind did not, however, efface the compassion that
led him to implore all those who "revel in affluence, [to] see the afflictions of humanity, and
bestow your superfluity to ease them.". Perhaps unfortunately for Hamilton, it was the former
quality of mind, the suspicion of human nature, that critics and enemies emphasized in painting his
character.

At the time, the letter greatly impressed the Presbyterian clergyman of St. Croix, Hugh
Knox, who managed to have it printed in the island newspaper. The printing secured Hamilton's
reputation as a youth of good character and formidable intellectual ability who needed to
transcend the confines of St. Croix. Accordingly, Knox, Nicholas Cruger, and a number of other
friends took up a collection to send Hamilton to the United States for a college education. They
hoped that he might return to St. Croix some day, but the American Revolution and subsequent
struggles in creating the American republic involved Hamilton in a much different course of
history.

Revolutionary Soldier

When he arrived in New York toward the end of 1772, Hamilton still sympathized with
the British, and could not fully appreciate the demands of American patriots. However, the
friends of Hugh Knox with whom Hamilton stayed in both New York and New Jersey were
Presbyterians definitely loyal to the colonial cause, and as a student at King's College (later
Columbia), Hamilton read the revolutionary works of James Otis, John Adams and John
Dickinson. His first public act of resistance to Britain was a 1774 speech in the Fields park of
New York City, in which he defended the Boston Tea Party and called for democratically chosen
delegates to the First Continental Congress.

Yet Hamilton did not yet consider himself a revolutionary. His prescription for resolving
the troubles that beset both the colonies and Britain was to bind the two closer together, but on an
equal footing that assured the God-given rights of all men, including those of personal and
economic liberty. The British Empire, in his eyes, was one which could include the United States
and England as equal partners. As events would prove, the British Parliament and King remained
unwilling to cede any significant degree of power. The shots fired at Lexington demonstrated that
there was to be no peaceful resolution to the imperial crisis.

Very early into the actual fighting with Britain, Hamilton joined the New York militia and
in 1775 accepted an appointment as captain of the New York Artillery Company. After
approximately two years of combat, while the outcome of the war remained entirely uncertain,
Commander-in-Chief George Washington invited Hamilton to become his aide-de-camp, with the
rank of lieutenant colonel. This appointment, and the access it brought to the corps of
gentlemanly soldiers and aristocrats in the Washington circle, set the stage for Hamilton's future
career in the Washington and Adams administrations. He was also increasingly respected by New
York political leaders who admired his eloquence and valued his proximity to Washington and
detailed knowledge of the course of the war.

Most importantly, this knowledge reinforced Hamilton's belief in the necessity of effective
government. As aide to Washington, he became acutely aware of the economic and political
troubles that were hindering the American army's ability to wage war, and was especially critical
of the Continental Congress's inefficiency in managing the military. Political caprice and
factionalism, inertia and ignorance, a tendency to defer to the states, seemed to sap Congress of
the authority necessary to win the war. "Their conduct," he wrote, "with respect to the army
especially is feeble, indecisive, and improvident." In his later career, these were the very qualities
Hamilton would seek to expunge from government.

One proposal Hamilton supported, as the British pressed the war in the South, was for the
American Army to enlist slaves there as they had occasionally done in the North. But the idea
struck to the heart of many whites' fears of black rebellion. Predictably, the proposal never
managed to overcome the strenuous objections of Southern legislatures, but it reveals the striking
distance between Hamilton and Jefferson on the question of slavery. While Jefferson continued to
own slaves and to suspect that blacks were inferior to whites, Hamilton wrote that "the contempt
we have been taught to entertain for the blacks makes us fancy many things that are founded
neither in reason nor in experience" and believed that "their natural faculties are as good as
ours."

As early as 1779 a cloud appeared on the horizon of Hamilton's life which suggested the
acrimony of the American political climate, and the degree to which war had raised the stakes of
all political debate. A rumor had been started to the effect that Hamilton had said "it was high
time for the people to rise, join General Washington, and turn Congress out of doors." Although
the charge was false, and Hamilton never believed in establishing a military dictatorship, as the
rumor implied, he recognized its potential to wreck his career. Nothing less than treason was
involved.

Hamilton eventually traced the story to a Massachusetts parson, William Gordon, who
refused to tell the young lieutenant colonel his source, fearing that a duel would result. After an
exchange of words in which Hamilton excoriated the parson, Gordon wrote to Washington
himself, asking for an apology from Hamilton in return for revealing to Washington the rumor's
source. Washington declined the whole offer and replied that the army had more important
business to attend to than rumor-mongering.

This episode represents an early instance of the sort of calumny that Hamilton would
experience as he entered more fully into the political arena and the public eye. It taught him the
importance of caution in dealing with the civilian government; in the political debates of the early
republic, he sought always to be forthright and aggressive in promoting his views, but never
precipitate.

During the war years, nonetheless, Hamilton acquired a wide reputation as a brave soldier,
a gentleman of refined sentiments, a writer and rhetorician of redoubtable talent, and a man of
supreme confidence who seemed to have a solution for every problem and to be perfectly willing
to distinguish his own views from his superiors, including Washington. The respect that he
commanded in St. Croix as an industrious and intelligent clerk found its echo -- a much more
significant echo -- in his success as an American soldier.

As fate would have it, the momentum that Hamilton's career received as a result of his
wartime reputation ultimately plunged him into the vicious storm of politics in the 1780s and 90s.
He would become a lightning rod for the attacks of Antifederalists who alleged, among other
things, that his economic plan for the United States entailed a conspiracy to return the country to
monarchy. The damage done to his reputation during the years of the early Republic would never
be fully repaired.

Hamilton's aversion to warfare, expressed in a 1777 letter to
an unidentified friend, seems a fitting though ironic preview of the battles to come. "Every finer
feeling of a delicate mind," he wrote, "revolts from the idea of sheding human blood and
multiplying the common evil o[f] life by the artificial methods incident to [war]. Were it not for
the evident necessity and in defence of all that is valuable in society, I could never be reconciled to
a mili[tary] character..." (sic). Within a decade, the war would be won and the political
bloodletting would begin.